Votes are weighted: 7 for 1st place, 5 for 2nd, 3 for 3rd, and 1 for 1st. We will recognize four Pyrite honors (or Nickel books, since that’s sort of the silver equivalent to pyrite); we are limiting voting to only books that received at least one vote at any level in the Pyrite poll. This is not exactly RealCommittee procedure; it is, instead, a mashup of the straw polling regulations and the Newbery rules, put into play here to account for the fact that we don’t have a real nomination list and so the number of discrete titles we’re looking at could be vast without some limiter.

See below the break for the list of books that are eligible with that rule in place and to vote, as per usual, in the comments. We’ll leave this up until after the New Year, and post results probably on Monday.

RealPrintz voting is a pretty particular thing, and winning has two conditions: “To win, a title must receive five first place votes and must also receive at least five more points than the second place title. If no title meets these criteria on the first ballot, any title receiving no votes is removed from consideration and a period of discussion of remaining titles follows.”

If we look at the Pyrite results and the voting regulations literally, we have a for sure winner; if we look at them and then try to scale them (where 5 out of 9 is a majority vote), we don’t have a winner.

We’re just shy of a month out from the Youth Media Awards, so the clock is ticking. We’re also still reading frantically, trying to get to everything anyone says we should have read (we’ll fail, at least a little, but we’re trying! And still growing the list. So comments, yadda yadda, add your ideas, etc.)

This past weekend, we hosted our fourth in-person mock event, except we changed it up a little and looked at YA and children’s lit together in what has been dubbed the Printzbery (see also our series of posts about crossover books), a new tradition that I think we’ll keep.

And it’s well past time to launch the Pyrite, in a slightly abbreviated version.

Comments were made, votes were tallied, numbers were crunched, and we’ve got a winner–no runoff this year; we’re calling it. As always, there’s a ton of really interesting information in the data so we’ll have in-depth analysis in a separate post after the honor voting results are in.

We’ve revisited our top 11 Pyrite Nominees, and those of you headed to MidWinter are likely already en route (or snowed in, which I hope isn’t too many of you), and all that means

(insert drumroll)

it’s voting time!

The plan: We’ll use the comments for voting, with polls to close Friday at midnight or so. We’ll tally everything Saturday morning, post the result, and run the honor vote with super tight turnaround. Our final slate will be up by Sunday evening, just before the (bound to be unexpected) Youth Media Awards announcement on Monday morning.

Technical details, voting procedure, and the full nominee list after the jump.[Read more…]

Our final three redux books are three of my own top books this year. They vary in length, in genre, in style, and more — indeed, in many ways I can’t imagine three more distinct titles. And yet, they have something essential in common (other than my appreciation, that is): all three are about moments of change and lives in transition, from Elena and Cat’s Prince and the Pauper/Vladimir Propp adventure to Windy and Rose’s quiet summer of seismic change to Marilyn Nelson’s personal journey that is a microcosm of change happening in the macrocosm of America during that same decade — whew! Big changes indeed, each one rendered beautifully.

Next up in our countdown to the Pyrite: a conversation on science fiction, dystopias, big ideas, rancid politics, and the girls who have just about had enough — girls who chart the world’s meltdown. Taking a look at a dirty and distressing near future, we’ve got A.S. King’s Glory O’Brien’s History of the Future paired with Alaya Dawn Johnson’s Love is the Drug. [Read more…]

Today, let’s revisit two of our Pyrite 11 that both have at their cores events that forever change their protagonists. I am, of course, talking about Jandy Nelson’s I’ll Give You the Sun and Andrew Smith’s 100 Sideways Miles.

Well, results are in for the Pyrite and for our local mock roster, and it’s interesting.

Also, we have a winner!

It will be interesting see if discussion knocks this one down in either final vote, but right now Jandy Nelson’s I’ll Give You the Sun is the runaway winner.

The breakdown: Locally, our group of 9 voted a unanimous 9 “yes, let’s discuss this” votes (note that we had an actual poll for the local Mock, although write-ins are encouraged). Here on the blog, with 27 voters, it received 13 nominations, the highest number.

Popularity or prediction? Only time will tell…

(Insert portentous dun-dun-dun music here.)

Let’s see what other data can be gleaned from the compare and contrast and data gathered.

Here at Someday, we have a tradition (this is year three) of a Mock Printz which, in a fit of serious humor,* we styled the Pyrite Printz. (Get it? Because Pyrite is like gold but not? Also, alliterative.)

As always, we are still (still!) reviewing serious contenders and reading away madly to catch up with all the surprise books (Carnival at Bray, anyone? No nook version and no copies at, count ’em, FOUR bricks and mortar stores).

But that’s us, and the Pyrite, my friends, is about you. So it’s time to get it started.